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Abstract
This contribution tackles the issue of EU democracy from the point of view of representation. Building on the discussion of ‘political’ and ‘democratic’ representation offered, respectively, by Pitkin (Citation1967) and Urbinati (Citation2006), it argues that at the heart of some of the most prominent analyses of EU democracy – those offered by Moravcsik, Majone and Scharpf – lies instead a particularly restrictive notion of ‘representation as delegation’. Starting from a principal–agent model of democracy, all three authors end up endorsing a notion of representation as delegation that both Pitkin and Urbinati would find insufficient and ultimately undemocratic. Moravcsik, Majone and Scharpf assume that governmental representatives in the EU act either as delegates or as trustees of their national constituencies and thus break that ongoing, dynamic relationship which is at the basis of a fuller notion of political or democratic representation. The contribution concludes by arguing that representation as delegation is insufficient to legitimate the EU and that the rescue of the full notion of political and democratic representation is necessary, particularly in the changed circumstances of the financially and economically bereaved European Union.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms and suggestions.
Notes
Rather the reverse is true, as voters tend to use European parliamentary elections to reward or punish European representatives for what they (their parties) did at home (Mair Citation2001). In both cases, they inevitably miss the target.
For a sophisticated critique based on an ‘authority retrieval principle’, see Agné Citation(2007).
Alternatively, and this is Scharpf's original formulation, such decisions are reached because they constitute a lowest common denominators and are, therefore, suboptimal from the very start.
On the two sides of this controversy, see also Moravcsik Citation(2011) and Schmitter Citation(2011).
In this contribution I clearly focus on the indirect representation of national constituencies and do not consider the direct representation of EU citizens by the European Parliament, as its role in securing representation, despite its increased decision-making powers, is still utterly underdeveloped.